with my telescopes these days. What do you need?”
Katharine told him about the file that had disappeared yesterday. “Do you think there’s any way of finding out where it came from?” she asked.
Howell thought for a moment. “I’m not sure,” he mused. “But practically everything that goes through the Net gets cached one place or another. If we can find the right cache record—”
Suddenly, the exhaustion Katharine had felt only a moment ago evaporated. If Phil Howell could find that file for her again — or even just the location of it — she’d at least have a chance of figuring out what the strange skull she’d uncovered in the ravine might be. “Could we do it this morning?”
“If we don’t do it this morning, I suspect there’s practically no chance we’ll find it,” Howell told her. “The caches are all timed to dump after a set period of time, which I suspect isn’t any more than twenty-four hours. But it could be a lot less.”
“Then let’s go,” Katharine said. Abandoning the rest of her shopping, she headed for the checkout stand.
If dinner wasn’t very interesting, Rob and Michael would just have to deal with it.
Josh Malani’s whole body hurt.
Instinctively trying to escape the pain, he drew his knees up to his chest, but that only hurt more. Then, as he came fully awake and felt the heat of the sun on his face, he knew why he hurt.
He wasn’t in bed. He wasn’t even home.
He was in the back of his truck, which was parked in the lot at Makena Beach.
Slowly, as if he were thumbing through a stack of snapshots, the memories of last night came back to him.
Feeling kind of funny when he’d left Mike Sundquist’s place.
Picking up Jeff, and taking off into the night.
The burning cane field that had been vomiting fire and smoke into the air.
The images flashed faster: glimpses of Jeff, getting out of the truck.
Another truck coming toward them.
Losing his nerve, and driving away. But if the police had caught him—
But they hadn’t caught him. He hadn’t dared to go home last night, afraid that someone in the car with the flashing lights that raced past him on the highway might have written down his license number. If the cops came looking for him at home, and his dad was drunk, the mess would only get worse. So instead he’d come out here to Makena, parked the pickup under the trees, and finally fallen asleep on the hard metal surface of the truck’s bed.
He sat up. The sun was already above the mountain, so he was way late for school. Maybe he should just cut the rest of the day and hang out here at the beach.
But what about Jeff? He remembered the crazy way Jeff had been acting — getting out of the truck as if he were going to run right into the flaming field.
What if he was dead? What if he’d choked to death, or tried to get away from the fire crew in the truck and run into the cane field?
Josh shuddered as he imagined Jeff charging through the burning cane. If he tripped … Josh shut his eyes against the image that came into his head. Why the hell had he left? If anything happened to Jeff …
But nothing had happened to Jeff, he told himself. Jeff was okay. Jeff had to be okay.
He was kidding himself, he knew. How the hell would he know if Jeff was all right? He sure hadn’t stayed around to find out. What would have happened if Mike Sundquist had just swum off the day he’d gotten caught under the reef, instead of trying to help him?
He would be dead now.
A hot ember of shame starting to burn deep inside him, Josh Malani moved from the bed of the truck to the cab, started the engine, and set off toward his house. Maybe, if no one was home, he’d grab a quick shower and change his clothes. Then, even if he didn’t get there till noon, he’d go to school, find Jeff, and apologize to him.
If Jeff was still speaking to him.
An hour later he slowed down as he neared the rundown house he and his parents had moved into six months ago, after his father had lost his last job. Seeing his dad’s rust-eaten Dodge sitting in the driveway — and his father himself slouched on the sofa in the living room, staring at the TV — he sped up and drove on by. He’d take a shower at school, and put on the same clothes he’d been wearing since yesterday. Better that than having his dad yelling at him; if the old man had been drinking, he might even take a swing at him.
Still accelerating as he squealed around the corner at the end of the block, concerned only with getting out of sight before his father noticed he was there, Josh never saw the brown sedan that pulled out of its parking space three houses down from his own, falling in behind him as he continued on to school.
In the stillness of the black-glass building in Kihei, the more than six hundred nodes that comprised one of the world’s two most powerful computers were hard at work. Yet as Katharine Sundquist gazed through the large window that gave anyone in the building’s lobby an unobstructed view of the immense machine, nothing betrayed the furious electronic activity going on within.
She saw a reel of tape spinning now and then, and a few lights occasionally blinking.
The machine worked in an oddly eerie solitude, monitoring itself, curing most of its own ills long before any of the humans involved in its maintenance were even aware that anything had gone wrong.
Beneath the false floor of the machine’s perfectly air-conditioned chamber, a maze of wires connected each node of the computer to all the others. In its turn, the entire mass of processing units and wiring was connected to cables that snaked from the building, to connect to the immense fiber-optic cable that lay deep beneath the surface of the Pacific, the essential aorta that supplied the machine with its lifeblood.
Data.
Billions upon billions upon billions of bytes of data, a seeming infinity of information, flowing through the computer’s systems; billions upon billions of connections every second, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Though Katharine had a vague understanding of how it worked, her mind could no more truly grasp the reality of it than it could the concept of infinity.
Too much happening in too little time and with no apparent effort.
Not like archaeology at all.
Turning away from the window, she crossed the lobby and pushed through the doors into the terminal rooms, where dozens of monitors and keyboards sat in the small carrels into which the rows of tables in the room had been subdivided.
Most of the monitors were idle; only a few people were quietly tapping at keyboards.
At the sixth carrel in the fourth row, Katharine found Phil Howell, looking as if he hadn’t moved at all during the few minutes she’d been stretching her aching muscles. The exhaustion that had dissipated so quickly when she thought there might be a chance of locating the vanishing file had quickly returned as Phil began setting up a search program that would pore through every cache in the enormous computer, searching for references to graphics files that had passed through the computer yesterday afternoon.
“Maybe between two and three,” Katharine had told him when he’d asked what time she and Rob had seen the file. “Maybe a little earlier — maybe a little later.”
The first list the computer generated seemed to scroll on endlessly. Even if the files they were looking for were there, she thought, it would be like searching for a needle in forty acres of haystacks.
As Phil patiently narrowed the search, Katharine felt both her excitement and her energy ebb.
Then, as she leaned a little closer to the screen, an electronic beep sounded and a window opened.
She felt a rush of adrenaline. “Is that it?” she asked.
“It’s something,” Phil told her. “But it’s mine, not yours.” With a flick of the mouse, he blew the window up to fill the screen. “I’ve been doing a search of my own,” he said. “A lot of people have been picking up strange radio signals from somewhere near a nova I’ve been watching. They’re just scraps, but they’re really weird. So I’ve had the computer run a search, looking for any more signals that might match, but that I haven’t heard about.” He grinned at the puzzled look that came over Katharine’s face. “It’s sort of like hunting for the score to an entire symphony, when all you’ve got to match it to is a few notes. Frankly, I didn’t really think I’d come up with anything.” He turned his attention to the computer screen, which was now displaying another box:
